Tag: Israel

Imagine living day after day unsure of when your home will be demolished. That will most likely mean having to quickly move elsewhere out of necessity, not out of choice. Will you be able to salvage some of your belongings, comfort your traumatised children as a bulldozer tears apart the memories of happier times laughing…

… this is, in part, a plea to the left to stop saying ‘Zionist’. Two days ago, the news was full of Jeremy Corbyn’s recent decision to suspend Labour MP Naz Shah while her alleged antisemitism is investigated. Two years ago, before she became an MP and during the height of the most recent Israeli…

Gaza represents much more than a metaphor for other ongoing struggles. According to UN Human Rights High Commissioner, Navi Pillay, “there appears to be a deliberate defiance on the part of Israel in complying with its international obligations. We should not allow this kind of impunity. We should not allow this to go uninvestigated, or…

There is no doubt that Hamas has exhibited extraordinary resilience under the most difficult of conditions that have bedeviled its period of political leadership in the Gaza Strip that started in 2007. It also seems clear as persuasively argued by Sandy Tolan in a valuable Common Dreams article [Tolan, “Blown Chances in Gaza: Israel &…

In Gaza and elsewhere, those who politically support anti-​occupation politics are easily cast as un-​civilian.In the media coverage of war, whether reports on individual incidents or the numbing tallies of casualties, the distinction between civilians and combatants is central and frequently contested. The killing of the four boys who had been playing soccer on a…

Repetition is merely the sign for the oppressed to surrender to fate. Either you accept your suffering or you unleash more suffering. Only eventual freedom will give meaning to the deaths of Gazans. At the moment of writing these lines, the BBC reports 100 deaths thus far in Gaza in the recent Israeli onslaught. As…

In May 2013, I traveled to Palestine for six months to collect data for a research project that examines the cultural and visual productions of natalist images, including pregnancy and birth. During the time I spent traveling throughout the West Bank and Israel, I took account of the various modes of (re)production of Palestinian women’s…

So long as antiwar activists denounce the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but not Israel’s occupation of Palestine, I will keep drawing the parallels. So long as Western feminists denounce the oppression of Arab women as a result of Islamic fundamentalism, but not as a result of Israeli occupation, I will raise my voice. I will…

Part of a special section in Vol 4 No 1 of Feminists@law whose authors argue for a feminist politics of solidarity that is truly emancipatory in its aspirations. The Palestinian woman in the Jewish state is a woman who confronts and defies bio-political, geopolitical and necropolitical Zionist settler colonialism, as well as socio-patriarchal oppression. The various…

We are not asking you for heroic action or to form freedom brigades. We are simply asking you not to be complicit in perpetuating the crimes of the Israeli state.1 A little over two years ago, on March 13, 2012, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) made a series of findings…

For me, these laws do not exist; they are meaningless — Bassem Tamimi (Palestinian activist)[vimeo 51930783 w=600&h=350] I recently watched Israeli director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s fim, The Law in These Parts, which unfolds the legal mechanisms of the occupation of the Palestinian territories (West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem) since their take over by the Israeli Defense Forces in 1967.…

In Israel and elsewhere, res­ist­ance to hege­monic power can never limit itself to the law and legal chan­nels.At the end of March 2002, Eli Yishai, then the Israeli Minister of Internal Affairs, decided that all requests for family unifications submitted by Palestinian citizens of Israel married to Palestinians from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) would…

On March 22nd, 2013 the Employment Tribunal (UK-London) rendered judgment in the case of Fraser v University & College Union (UCU). Ruling in favour of UCU, the Tribunal’s judgment brought immense relief to UCU members, BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) activists, and others who were anxious about the potential repercussions that a negative outcome might have for…

Yet another massacre is unfolding in Gaza, the largest prison in the world.* We are surrounded by familiar chatter: ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’; ‘Palestinians’ legitimate resistance to (the 1967) occupation’; ‘who started it this time?’ Most insidious, however, is the stale refrain, sung by a chorus which includes President Obama, that the violence is disastrous…

Once again the bombs are falling on the Gaza Strip, a stretch of territory excised from Palestine proper as a result of continuing illegal and illegitimate actions by Israel. In fact, Gaza has become a closed ghetto, first cut off from Palestine in violation of the partition plans and political programs and then turned into…

November 15, 2012 Gaza. As I begin to write this piece my computer falls from my hands to the floor as a bomb drops meters from the Abousalama family home in Saftawi neighborhood, Gaza, Palestine. I have grown accustom to the loud blast of bombs being dropped around two kilometers from our family home this…